The Foreign Desk

If you scratch beneath the surface, the Bus Pass Revolution, the Tropical Spring (though it’s winter in these parts), call it what you will, might be better monikered A Rebelião do Amor. The Love Uprising.

When China’s former premier, Wen Jiabao, visited India in December 2010, he was full of talk about the two country’s joint aspirations, their friendship, their co-operation, and about how their two-way trade would almost double to $100bn a year by 2015.

Much has been written this past week about a Syrian rebel named Khalid al-Hamad, who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Sakkar, and who gained notoriety after a video emerged of him appearing to eat part of a dead pro-government fighter’s lung.

The latest corruption scandal to embroil India’s coalition government is scarcely a surprise. The nephew of Pawan Kumar Bansal (right), the railways minister, was to be paid Rs100m (about £1.2m) to fix a top Railways Board appointment. Such appointments have been fixed for decades, often financed with money from companies that later benefit, as was [...]

Rarely has a piece of salad served as a symbol of friendship, especially not a limp and watery lettuce. As a gesture, however, the leafy homegrown green presented to my friend Richard by the family elder among a large family of Syrians during our holiday to their country a couple of years ago has stuck in our minds as one of the kindest and most generous of gifts.

One of Margaret Thatcher’s most significant legacies is privatisation – not only for introducing the policy itself, but also for adding the word into the world’s every-day vocabulary. Her death this week seems a good moment to recount how we launched the word on July 28 1979 in The Financial Times.
The day before, I [...]

Almost 42 years since Bangladesh won independence from Pakistan, the ghosts of the bloody 1971 liberation war still haunt the nation. The bloodletting, rape and torture inflicted by Pakistani militias prevent many Bengalis to this day from treating the country’s road to freedom as just a tragic tale of the past.